Touch in Sports Coaching and Physical Education

In our increasingly risk-averse society, touch and touching behaviours between professionals and children have become a fraught issue. In sports coaching and physical education, touching young sports performers and participants has, in some contexts, come to be redefined as dubious and dangerous. Coaches find themselves operating in a framework of regulations and guidelines that create anxiety, for them and others, and for many volunteer (and sometimes professional) coaches, this fearful context has led them to question the risks and benefits of their continuing involvement in sport.
Touch in Sports Coaching and Physical Education is the first book to explore this difficult topic in detail. Drawing on a series of international studies from the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden and elsewhere, it presents important new research evidence and examines theories of risk and moral panic that frame the discussion. By challenging prevailing orthodoxies the book makes a significant contribution to critical discussion around practice, pedagogy, politics and policy in sport and physical education, and also informs current debates around the nature and quality of all in loco parentis relationships.

Dr Heather Piper is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and is a qualitative researcher whose interests and research experiences span a broad range of educational and social issues. She has co-authored and edited a number of special issues and books (including Don't Touch! and Researching Sex and Lies in the Classroom, both published by Routledge).

1. Child Protection in Sports Coaching and Physical Education 2. Hands-off PE Teaching and Sports Coaching in the UK 3. Training 'Safe' Bodies in an Era of Child Panic in the United States: New Technologies for Disciplining the Self 4. Should we be Worried? Risk, Fear andthe 'Greyness' of Touch: Experience in Aotearoa New Zealand Physical Education and School Sport 5. The Pedagogical Consequences of 'No Touching' in Physical Education: The Case of Sweden 6. "It's Not What you See, it's How it Feels": Touch in the Tactile Context of Cypriot Track and Field Sport 7. Teaching and Touching in Physical Education in Pre and Post-Communist Romania 8. Exploring the Appropriateness of Contemporary Child Protection Measures in Danish Sport 9. She'll be Right? An Australian Perspective on Caring for Young People in Physical Education and Sport 10. Care and Touch in Trampoline Gymnastics: Reflections and Analysis from the UK 11. Fear, Risk, and Child Protection in Sport: Critique and Resistance